In Gaza, Troops and Settlers Take Each Other’s Measure

Jewish settlers, some draped in white prayer shawls and others with wailing infants in arms, implored Israeli troops Monday not to push ahead with the evacuation of the settlements of the Gaza Strip. But Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and top commanders said the watershed operation would go forward as planned.

At most of the 21 Jewish settlements of Gaza, soldiers who arrived Monday morning to serve eviction notices were turned back by protesters who locked settlement gates, blockaded roads and burned tires.

But in half a dozen of them, troops went door to door, officially delivering a long-expected but unwelcome piece of news: Residents must be out of their homes by midnight Wednesday or face eviction.

Sharon, in a nationwide address, acknowledged that relinquishing Gaza was emotionally wrenching. But he insisted, as he has for months, that Israel had no choice but to let go of a territory where 8,500 settlers lived among more than 1.3 million Palestinians. Their heavily fortified enclaves were guarded by hundreds of army troops and subject to frequent attack by Palestinian militants. The arrangement has for decades exacted an exorbitant cost in government funds and soldiers’ lives.

“It’s no secret that I, like many others, believed and hoped that we could hold on forever to Netzarim and Kfar Darom,” the prime minister said, referring to two Gaza settlements known as ideological strongholds. “But the changing reality in the country, in the region and in the world led me to change my position.”

Sharon said the Palestinian Authority must take advantage of a climate of reconciliation the withdrawal could engender. “Now the Palestinians need to prove themselves; the world is waiting,” he said.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, seeking to bolster the notion that his government will promote democratic rule in Gaza, formally announced a Jan. 21 date for a delayed parliamentary election. The polling, in which the militant group Hamas will participate for the first time, was to have taken place in July.

Abbas praised the pullout, but emphasized that negotiations over the terms for Palestinian statehood must go much further.

“The Israeli withdrawal ... is a very important and historic step, but it is an initial step that should take place not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” he said in a statement.

In an explicit challenge to Abbas, Palestinian militant groups have been staging raucous street celebrations, some of them veering perilously close to confrontation with Israeli troops. In Khan Yunis, marchers affiliated with a relatively small militant faction, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, burned a cardboard model of a red-roofed settlement while Israeli soldiers watched from the main watchtower of Neve Dekalim, Gaza’s largest settlement. The troops fired warning shots to keep the demonstrators back.

Under the baking sun of Gaza, some Jewish settlers tore their clothing in a traditional gesture of mourning, while others maintained a defiantly festive air. At the seaside settlement of Shirat Hayam, young protesters who had taken over a string of beachfront shacks locked the settlement gate, then pointedly turned their backs on arriving troops, to sing religious songs and dance.

At times the encounters between troops and settlers were sharply adversarial; at times they had the nature of a family quarrel. In keeping with the long-standing Israeli army ethos of commanders not asking troops to carry out tasks they would not tackle themselves, senior officers were part of the give-and-take with distraught settlers.

The army commander overseeing the pullout, Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, was greeted with jeers when he came to Neve Dekalim. “A Jew doesn’t expel a Jew!” protesters screamed at him, using the slogan of the anti-withdrawal groups.

In another scene captured by Israeli TV cameras, a top commander was accosted by a settler who had served under him in combat.

“I am not your enemy ... we fought together shoulder to shoulder,” said the tearful settler, Liron Zaiden. The general, Erez Zucker, who commands the storied Golani Brigade, patiently listened to the tirade, then embraced the distraught younger man.

Settlers were well aware that troops could have easily forced their way into the settlements that barred them. But many settlers seemed to feel the need for a symbolic show of resistance. Netzer Hazani, a small community in the main Gush Katif block, presented a typical tableau.

About 250 people, some residents and some outside protesters, chained the entrance gate and made a barrier of parked cars and bodies in the road. Residents withstood withering heat for four hours before troops arrived.

Dozens of men in shawls chanted prayers around a table bearing a Torah scroll. Nearby, teenage boys wearing the trademark orange T-shirts of the settler campaign clambered atop the steel gate. Women with babies sat in the shade of a tree near the front gate.

Yehuda Bashari, the elected head of Netzer Hazani’s local council, met in the road with army officers, informing them that residents did not want to receive individual eviction notices. A triumphant cheer rose when the military vehicles turned around and drove away.

“It is a victory,” Anita Tucker, a longtime Netzer Hazani resident, said afterward. “But we just won the battle. We didn’t win the war.”

Military spokesmen said there was no legal need to serve the notices to people at home. The order to leave was valid without individual deliveries.

Despite the tumult, settlers continued to leave Monday, some of them helped by troops who packed boxes for them and loaded them into trucks and cars. At Neve Dekalim, settlers who had barred the way to troops allowed a convoy of moving vans inside after protracted negotiations.

More than half the Gaza settlers have left, according to official estimates, and some settlements are ghost towns. Soldiers have been marking abandoned homes, most of them festooned with anti-government graffiti, with an “X” in a large circle.

“The number of families leaving is not inconsiderable,” said Eival Giladi, Sharon’s point man for the withdrawal. “Every family that leaves legitimizes more to do the same.”

Settler leaders are urging holdouts to offer passive resistance, but a core of about 5,000 protesters from outside Gaza, some of them radical young people from the West Bank, is thought by Israeli authorities to be likelier to scuffle with troops, or worse. Early Monday, young protesters near Neve Dekalim scattered sharp spikes to puncture the tires of army vehicles, set piles of tires afire and threw paint bombs at military jeeps.

“I can’t envision soldiers taking Jewish mothers and children out of their homes,” said Assaf Horesh, 28, who came from a West Bank settlement several weeks ago and stayed on to protest the withdrawal. “This is the calm before the storm.”

In a largely formal move, the Israeli Cabinet on Monday approved the evacuation of the main Gaza settlement block, after having earlier approved pulling out of three smaller settlements. Sixteen ministers voted in favor and four against.

“The Cabinet decision today grants the army the freedom to act as it sees fit from the operational point of view in the Gaza Strip, the freedom to operate without any restriction,” said Matan Vilnai, a minister in Sharon’s government. “The goal we should all share at the moment is that on Sept. 1, every child will find his place in school.”

Housing Minister Yitzhak Herzog warned that if settlers didn’t leave by Wednesday, they could lose part of their compensation package.

“I am calling on each of the settlers: Don’t lose the money you’re entitled to receive because you refuse to obey the order. It will deprive your family, and it’s simply a pity,” he said. “Demonstrate, protest, but obey the order.”

The Gaza pullout has sharply divided Israeli society, even though a solid majority has consistently supported Sharon’s plan.

“The days to come are days of mourning for all Israelis,” novelist David Grossman wrote in the Haaretz newspaper. “Mourning for the personal and ideological pain for settlers whose dreams have been shattered; mourning for the fact that Israel was drawn into such a dangerous and unrealistic adventure as the creation of Gush Katif.”

In the months leading up to the pullout, settlers challenged the authority of the Cabinet, the parliament and the prime minister. On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected the latest in a string of anti-pullout petitions.

Some fear Israel’s democratic institutions have been weakened by the dispute, but others insist that they have emerged stronger.

“This is a country which proves that it can make a difficult decision, a democratic decision, without fear, and that it is not afraid of threats and protests,” said Vice Premier Shimon Peres. “On the other hand, it’s a democratic country, in the sense that we can also protest, and we can also weep.”

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Ellingwood reported from Netzer Hazani and King from Jerusalem. Staff writer Shlomi Simhi in Shirat Hayam and special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Khan Yunis contributed to this report.